1. Field of the Invention
Implementations relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to the removing of certain documents from search results and/or general access.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are identified as search results and are returned to the user as links.
Sometimes the search results include a web page that the user deems undesirable. This web page may be deemed undesirable by the user because the web page is spam, the web page relates to content unrelated to the user's interests, the web page contains content that the user dislikes or finds offensive, or for some other reason.